In a new video interview with Chainlink Today, Omar Azhar, Head of Business Development at Matter Labs, the engineering team behind ZKsync, detailed the importance of verifying identity onchain and how ZKsync is leveraging Chainlink to help bring tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) to scale.
“There’s an entire world outside of just crypto – everything from cars to real estate to other types of securities,” he explained. “That is trillions of dollars of market in so many different types of assets. All of that needs to be brought onchain.”
In 2023, ZKsync integrated Chainlink Price Feeds and joined Chainlink Scale to support the creation of secure, scalable, feature-rich decentralized applications via Chainlink’s oracle infrastructure, which has enabled over $21 trillion in transaction value. Last year, ZKsync integrated Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) to expand its Elastic Chain ecosystem and help satisfy growing institutional interest in tokenization.
Azhar said the RWA trend now extends beyond the tokenization of traditional asset classes such as funds and ETFs to the tokenization of onchain identities. Recently, 3.6 million residents of Buenos Aires received access to decentralized digital IDs powered by ZKsync Era. The initiative is geared toward giving citizens more privacy and control over personal information including birth and marriage certificates as well as income and academic records.
As the standard for onchain finance, verifiable data, and cross-chain interoperability, Chainlink plays a critical role in the convergence of traditional and decentralized finance, which accelerates RWA adoption.
“Without price you can’t really have digital assets in liquidity pools, being able to swap, being able to use as collateral – Chainlink brings the offchain actual live feed of prices onchain,” Azhar explained.
“Chainlink is helping solve problems for RWAs outside of DeFi – it’s also allowing you to verify. Without the ability to verify data, verify prices, there’s a lot of everyday things you just can’t do. I can’t verify my driver’s license; I can’t verify that I own something.”
He described tokenized assets as “a complete game changer” because they unlock benefits such as atomic settlement, fractionalization, programmability, and the ability to serve as continuously updated unified golden records throughout the global financial system.
“Now you have so much more utility for what you own.”
To learn more about ZKsync, visit their website, X, Telegram, and Discord.
Watch the full interview.